That student, Nick D’Aloisio, a programming whiz who wasn’t even born
when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his news-reading app, Summly, to
the company on Monday for a sum said to be in the tens of millions of
dollars. Yahoo said it would incorporate his algorithmic invention,
which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using
smartphones, in its own mobile apps, with Mr. D’Aloisio’s help.
“I’ve still got a year and a half left at my high school,” he said in a
telephone interview on Monday. But he will make arrangements to test out
of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London, partly to
abide by the company’s new and much-debated policy that prohibits
working from home.
Mr. D’Aloisio, who declined to comment on the price paid by Yahoo (the technology news site AllThingsD pegged the purchase price at about $30 million), was Summly’s largest shareholder.
Summly’s other investors, improbably enough, included Wendi Murdoch,
Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono.
The most important one was Li Ka-shing, the
Hong Kong billionaire, whose investment fund supported Mr. D’Aloisio’s
idea early on, before it was even called Summly.
“They took a gamble on me when I was a 15-year-old,” Mr. D’Aloisio said,
by providing seed financing that let him hire employees and lease
office space.
The fund read about Mr. D’Aloisio’s early-stage app on TechCrunch, the
Silicon Valley blog of record, found his e-mail address and startled him
with a message expressing interest.
The others signed up later. “Because it was my first time around, people just wanted to help,” he said.
For teenagers who fancy themselves entrepreneurs — and their parents,
too — the news of the sale conjured up some feelings of inadequacy, but
also awe. For Brian Wong, the 21-year-old founder of Kiip, a mobile
rewards company, the reaction was downright laughable: “I feel old!”
A few years ago, Mr. Wong was described in the news media as the
youngest person ever to receive venture capital funding. But a couple of
younger founders came along — “and then Nick broke all of our records,”
Mr. Wong said on Monday.
Among the attributes that helped Mr. D’Aloisio, he said, was a
preternatural ability to articulate exactly what he wanted Summly to be.
“There were no umms, no uhhs, no hesitations, no insecurities,” Mr.
Wong said.
Mr. D’Aloisio, for his part, sounded somewhat uninterested in answering
questions about his age on Monday. He acknowledged that it was an
advantage in some pitch meetings, and certainly in the news media, “but
so was the strength of the idea.” He was more eager to talk about his
new employer, Yahoo, which is trying to reinvent itself as a
mobile-first technology company (having dropped the digital media
tagline it used before Marissa Mayer became chief executive last year).
“People are kind of underestimating how powerful it’s going to become and how much opportunity is there,” he said.
For a company that badly wants to be labeled innovative, those words are worth a lot.
Mr. D’Aloisio’s father, who works at Morgan Stanley, and his mother, a
lawyer, had no special knowledge of technology. But they nurtured their
son’s fascination with it and he started coding at age 12. Eventually he
decided to develop an app with what he calls an “automatic
summarization algorithm,” one that “can take pre-existing long-form
content and summarize it.” In other words, it tries to solve a problem
that is often summed up with the abbreviation tl;dr: “too long; didn’t
read.”
Summly officially came online last November. By December, Mr. D’Aloisio was talking to Yahoo and other suitors.
Yahoo said in a statement that while the Summly app would be shut down,
“we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life
throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences soon.”
Other news-reading apps have attracted corporate attention as of late,
reflecting the scramble by media companies to adapt to skyrocketing
traffic from mobile devices. The social network LinkedIn was said to be
pursuing an app called Pulse earlier this month. Still, the eight-figure
payday for a teenage entrepreneur on Monday struck some as outlandish
and set off speculation that Yahoo was willing to pay almost any price
for “cool.”
Mr. D’Aloisio, though, will have plenty of time to prove his and his
algorithm’s worth. As for the sizable paycheck from Yahoo, he said he
did not have any specific plans for the sudden windfall. “It’s going to
be put into a trust fund and my parents will help manage it,” he said.
He did say, however, that “angel investing could be really fun.” When
not working at Yahoo, he will keep up with his hobbies — cricket in
particular — and set his sights on attending college at Oxford. His
intended major is philosophy.
wooow!!
ReplyDeleteSo have any of you naysayers tried Summly? I have and think it's wonderful. I'm 67 so not one of the "young Twitter" class. However the App allows me to scan many sources, in many fields. It is "written" in a manor that allows you to understand what the article is trying to say. It's not just the first paragraph of the article, but pulls together important points. If I want to go further, it's a simple tap to the article, and with another couple of taps, I can send it to myself for later reading.
ReplyDeleteIt's a lot more than the usual compilation. You should try it.
It will be interesting to see how the Courts react to Mr. D'Aloisio's algorithm.
ReplyDeleteIn general, the U.S. Copyright Act under 17 USC 106 grants exclusive rights to the original author for the preparation of derivative works. Unless the author has granted this right to whoever runs this application, then they may be subject to copyright infringement.
Another interesting aspect is originality. If the original author (such as a news service) does grant the right to adapt and duplicate their material, then there is a question of who owns the derivative works produced by his program. In general, the Courts will not grant copyright protection unless the works exhibits some form of 'originality' (i.e. it is subject to some creative process).
An algorithm cannot, by definition, produce an original creative works, and so there would be no basis to support a copyright claim by someone using the program (such as by Yahoo, in this case). For example, Adobe Acrobat does not exhibit any originality when it creates a 'pdf' version of something, and so whoever runs that program is not granted any copyright protection for the adapted works.